Inferno: a powerful chapter about victims in this great history of World War II

Inferno, by Max Hastings (Alfred A. Knopf: New York 2011). A great, insightful history of World War II. This post is taken from my recent Facebook post, about the Victims chapter within the book.

I've been reading "Inferno," by the excellent British historian and writer Max Hastings. It's a well-written history of World War II, a week by week, sometimes hour by hour account. I feel compelled to share a little of the book with you. 

 

Hastings includes a 27-page chapter called "Victims," an overview of what the different subjugated populations suffered during the war. Mass deportations, massacres, hunger, and misery were inflicted on tens of millions in Europe and Asia. 1.5 million Poles were deported to Siberian exile by the Russians. 350,000 of them died of starvation, about 30,000 were executed. Hastings writes, "In addition to almost 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, over 3 million Russians died in German captivity, while huge numbers of non-Jewish civilians were massacred in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries." (In Greece, a Wikipedia article estimates 500,000 to 800,000 deaths during the war, out of a pre-war population of 7,222,000.)

 

The Victims chapter naturally includes an account of the Holocaust. The Jewish holocaust exists "in its own dimension," in Hastings's words. Hitler and the Germans pursued the annihilation of European and Russian Jews even at huge costs to themselves and their ability to fight on many fronts. Almost all levels of German society, and most of the subjected countries under German control, willingly contributed to the deranged effort. 

 

I was especially moved by several accounts Hastings gives of the "ordinary Germans" who carried out the early executions of the Jews. "On 13 July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in a convoy of trucks at the Polish village of Josefow, whose inhabitants included 1,800 Jews. Mostly middle-aged reservists from Hamburg...they gathered around their commander, fifty-three year old Maj. Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman...In a choking voice, and with tears in his eyes, he told them they had a most unwelcome assignment...to arrest all Jews in the village, remove to a work camp men of working age, and kill the remainder...He then invited any man who felt unable to perform this unpleasant task to step aside...At least twenty were permitted to return to barracks...Yet a sufficiency of others stayed to do the business. Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven year old tailor, killed his initial batch easily enough, but then fell into conversation with a mother and daughter from Kassel, who were destined to die next...he appealed and was sent instead to guard the marketplace while others did his share of the shooting...One member of the battalion, Walter Zimmerman, later gave evidence: 'There were always some comrades who found it easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.'"

 

Not all Germans were complicit. "A small minority displayed high courage in succoring the persecuted, at mortal risk to themselves. A young Berlin shoemaker named August Kossman, a communist, hid Irma Simon, her husband and son in his little apartment for two years. The teenager Erich Newmann's mother, a cafe owner, sheltered a young Jewish family friend in Charlottenburg for five months...Rita Kirsh's mother sheltered a young man named Solomon Striem, a family friend...'I cannot just turn the poor hunted man away.' Such extraordinarily courageous people sustained a shred of the honor of German civilization."

So, after reading this chapter, I thought I should share a bit of it with you. These events took place about eighty years ago. May those described here who suffered and died always be remembered. May we also remember always those who sheltered and helped the hunted at great peril to themselves.

The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry: a primer for today's Covid-19 crisis

 The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry (Penguin Books, 2004).

 

Finished reading John M. Barry’s 2004 book, The Great Influenza. It is about the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, and perhaps 25 to 50 million people worldwide. Here are some things that stayed with me as I read. 

 

1. Barry subscribes to the theory that the 1918 strain of influenza began in Haskell, Kansas, jumping from pigs to humans. Other contemporary scientists dispute this, offering Britain, France, and China as possible source sites. There’s no way to be sure.

 

2. Influenza killed about 675,000 Americans. The population then was one third what it is today.

 

3. It was called the Spanish Flu because Spain was the only Western country where journalists were free to write about the spread of the flu since Spain was not involved in World War I. All other countries censored newspapers on the subject because they feared it would hurt national morale. The name Spanish Flu has nothing to do with the origin of the epidemic.

 

 4. The Woodrow Wilson administration harshly censored bad news about the pandemic. Mostly positive news was allowed. Wilson was focused on one thing — the war effort. He himself was silent on the flu. His administration’s efforts to fight the epidemic in America came second to the war effort. The censorship of bad news about the flu — it was often reported that the flu was almost over when in fact it was just beginning — fed the terror in American cities and towns as it became obvious that thousands were dying from a mysterious plague. “'Don’t Get Scared!' was the advice printed in virtually every newspaper in the country.”

 

5. Typical symptoms were severe headaches, high fevers, severe coughing that did not stop, severe fatigue, lungs fillings with fluid until breathing was impossible. “Blood poured from noses, ears, eye sockets; some victims lay in agony; delirium took others away while living."

 

6. About 45,000 American soldiers and seamen died of influenza and pneumonia in 1918-1919. Total American combat deaths in the War were 53,402. The military establishment was very slow to deal with the problem, often ignoring doctors and specialists even when the magnitude of the problem was clear. For months, commanders continued to concentrate soldiers and staff by the thousands in camps and trains despite the outcry from doctors and researchers. Colonel Charles Hagadorn took command of Camp Grant in Illinois on August 8, and ignored the entreaties of his medical staff not to move men into crowded barracks. By October 8, 452 men had died at Camp Grant. After hearing the current death toll on that day, Colonel Hagadorn, a soldier with a long career in the Army, ordered his subordinates out of the building to stand for inspection. He shot himself as they stood outside, waiting for him. 

 

7. The influenza was especially hard on young healthy people, aged 20 - 40 years old, like those soldiers. They had relatively healthy immune systems, and something about that strain provoked a massive immune response which often overwhelmed the victim, even without pneumonia being involved. 

 

8. In Philadelphia, the Director of Public Health, Dr. Wilmer Krusen, a political appointee, declared in early September 1918 that the victims that had up till then died had suffered from “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” There was no need for alarm. On September 28, officials promoted a Liberty Loan parade to sell war bonds. Hundreds of thousands attended. In the week of October 16, 4,597 people in Philadelphia died from influenza or pneumonia brought on by influenza. Probably many more died indirectly. Ghastly scenes. People dying in houses and apartments by the hundreds, bleeding from their noses and mouths, never making it to a hospital or doctor or nurse. Hospital wards impossibly overcrowded, corpses in the streets around the hospitals. Nurses and doctors dying themselves. Homeless orphans in every neighborhood. These assurances and scenes were repeated in many cities.

 

9. Many Americans saw the suffering right in front of them in 1918. In 2020, the very sick are quickly taken to hospitals and confined to ICU and Coronavirus wards. The vast majority of us now never see what the most severe patients go through.

 

10. Barry does not mention any organized protests against the quarantine measures that were eventually taken in the hardest hit cities.

 

11. Some of the most haunting scenes were from Alaska and other remote areas. “In Nome, 176 of 300 Eskimos had died…One doctor visited ten tiny villages, and found ’three wiped out entirely; others average 85% deaths…survivors generally children.'” Of course, all over the world, millions died in villages far from any doctor or nurse.

 

12. Woodrow Wilson was said to suffer from a stroke at the Versailles Conference which determined the peace terms for Germany. It is now believed by many researchers and historians that Wilson had influenza, which may have brought on his stroke. He was a changed man. After his illness, he abandoned his plans for an equitable peace with Germany, and completely acceded to the demands of French Premier Georges Clemenceau to harshly punish Germany. It’s often said that the punitive measures agreed to at Versailles sparked the beginnings of Nazism in Germany, and led to World War II twenty years later. 

 

13. Pg. 396. “Whoever held power, whether a city government or some private gathering of the locals, they generally failed to keep the community together. They failed because they lost trust. They lost trust because they lied.”

 

14. Barry is summing up the strenuous work of the handful of best American scientists and doctors, and he mentions this: “They had always proceeded from well-grounded hypotheses...they had not given quinine or typhoid vaccine to influenza victims in the wild hope that because it worked against malaria or typhoid it might work against influenza. Others had done these things and more, but they had not.” Curious to read this echo from 2004 and 1918 to the recent controversy we’ve had with Chlorquinine.

 

15. Writing in 2004, Barry says in the Afterward, “The CDC estimates that if a new pandemic virus strikes, then the U.S. death toll will most likely fall between 89,00 and 300,000. It also estimates a best case scenario of 75,000 deaths and a worst case scenario in which 422,000 Americans would die…If a new pandemic struck, people suffering from ARDS [Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome] would quickly overwhelm intensive care units.”

 

Next on my reading list: The Plague, by Albert Camus.

Breaking free from an insane family and still loving them: Educated, by Tara Westover

Educated, by Tara Westover (Random House, New York 2018). This memoir is the story of Tara Westover's childhood and young adulthood in a family headed by her fanatical Mormon father in a remote Idaho town. The father is a paranoid religious zealot who demands that his wife and children follow his peculiar ideas of family life. An older brother sadistically abuses Tara throughout her growing up. She eventually breaks free of the family and discovers a new life in the academic worlds of Oxford and Harvard universities. She's a very smart, talented woman. It's a tortuous path. Each step is a struggle against the bonds of -- remarkably -- family love and devotion.

Westover is a good writer. The scenes of her childhood working in dangerous conditions in her father's enormous junkyard are nicely detailed and vivid. Imagine a 14 year old girl surrounded by sharp rusted metal, and a father who routinely drops tons of debris near his children, often injuring them. She has no choice but to work here. She is injured numerous times by the actions of her schizophrenic, abusive father. The father is forever afraid the federal government will come and take his children away. He has good reason to fear this. By any reasonable standard, his behavior toward his family is criminally negligent and abusive. This is not about Mormonism per se, but about religious and political fanaticism to the point of serious delusion.

Then there's the old brother Shawn. A psychopath who enforces the father's strange ideas of proper behavior for girls. He routinely demands obeisance from Tara, and if she resists, he physically tortures her.

"I was yanked to my feet. Shawn grasped a fistful of my hair--using the same method as before, catching the clump near my scalp so he could maneuver me--and dragged me into the hallway...'Now the bitch cries,' Shawn said. 'Why? Because someone sees you for the slut you are?'" He savagely beats her. This was Shawn's punishment for her having an innocent date with a boy in town her age. Shawn begs her forgiveness afterwards. Which doesn't prevent him from doing the same thing a few weeks later. These scenes are repeated in one form or another until Tara manages to escape the family.

Where is her mother in all this? A midwife, a maker of homeopathic remedies (snake oil, basically), but a shrewd businesswoman, the mother is herself browbeaten by her husband. She fails to protect her daughter and children from their father and Shawn. Amazingly, she builds her remedies into a successful business, hiring other women from the town to create the bogus formulas.

It's sickening. And yet Tara loves these people. She's devoted to them. She believes them.

Despite her parents' objections, Tara manages to go to Brigham Young University. There she begins to sense that a different life, a different sense of womanhood, is possible. The last third of the memoir is about her struggle to be educated, to live apart from her family. Her talent as a writer and thinker are recognized by a number of professors (all men), and almost improbably she goes to Oxford and then Harvard, where she eventually completes a PhD in History. This last part of the book is not as complex and riveting as the earlier chapters. But she does create an effective portrait of the devastating struggle to be educated, to think for herself free of her family.

To detect cancer when it first appears: The First Cell, by Azra Raza

The First Cell, and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, by Azra Raza. Basic Books, New York 2019. Dr. Raza is professor of Medicine and MDS Center Director at Columbia University. She also was an oncologist for several years at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo.

In this moving and complicated book, veteran oncologist Dr. Raza argues for shifting research and clinical resources to the prevention and early detection of cancer, as opposed to aggressive treatments for and research into advanced stage cancers. She explains that for many of the deadliest cancers (lung, pancreatic, leukemia), the outcomes for most patients today are barely better than they were fifty years ago. In many cases, patients have their lives prolonged by new and experimental treatments for a matter of only weeks or months (though some do achieve much longer remissions). But they often achieve these incremental improvements while in agony and pain from the treatment side effects.

She demonstrates the awful torments of advanced stage cancers with narratives of a handful of her own patients, as well as of her husband Harvey (himself an oncologist). All of these patients died. I was very moved by the plight of these patients. They of course reminded me of my wife Marilyn's painful treatment for Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and her sudden death from the side effects of her chemotherapy.

Araz argues that mouse studies and other laboratory research for drugs development often fail produce drugs that have any useful effect on actual human patients. She wants to move money from the work on advanced-stage therapies, arguing that we may be fifty or more years away from truly dramatic advances or cures. And she wants that money shifted to prevention and early detection. She believes we may be close to being able to detect cancers in their earliest appearance in the body -- in the first cell (or group of cells) of the book's title. I found her detailed analysis of various therapies difficult to follow; there are lengthy passages where she seems to be addressing fellow oncologists and members of the medical establishment.

Yet, shifting resources in this way means cutting back on money and research for drug trials that hundreds of thousands of frightened and desperate terminal patients are clamoring for. She acknowledges that this won't be popular, and that is one of the major hurdles of her approach. Furthermore, we have a huge and profitable cancer drug industry that won't easily give up their stake in the way cancer is currently fought.

My knowledge of cancer research and treatments is not deep. Most of what I know I learned in the terrible months following my wife's diagnosis. As a non-expert, I appreciate Dr. Raza's approach. It makes sense to prevent and detect cancer in its earliest possible stages, and thus decrease the numbers of patients who suffer its physical, emotional, and financial consequences.